Budapest is witnessing a constitutional demolition derby. On Monday, July 13, 2026, Hungary’s newly elected parliament, led by Prime Minister Péter Magyar, used its fresh two-thirds supermajority to pass a sweeping constitutional amendment designed to immediately oust President Tamás Sulyok. This dramatic move is the focal point of a wider campaign to dismantle the sixteen-year illiberal state built by former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Rather than waiting for terms to expire or navigating traditional bureaucratic channels, Magyar’s government is using raw legislative power to clean house, raising fundamental questions about how a nation restores democracy when the previous regime wrote the very laws governing the state.
To understand the speed of this political purge, one must understand the depth of the system it aims to destroy. For nearly two decades, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party built what they called a National System of Cooperation. Critics simply called it a mafia state. By slowly rewriting the constitution, altering electoral districts, and filling every independent watchdog agency with loyal partisans, Orbán created a self-reinforcing network that many believed was impossible to defeat at the ballot box.
Then came Péter Magyar.
Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who broke ranks in early 2024, tapped into a deep well of public anger over corruption and institutional decay. His upstart Tisza party secured a shocking landslide victory in April 2026, earning the same two-thirds parliamentary supermajority that Orbán had previously used as a personal legislative wand. Now, Magyar is using that same tool to execute what his administration calls Operation Clean Sweep.
The first major target of this operation is Tamás Sulyok, the seventy-year-old president of the republic. Sulyok, a former constitutional court chief justice, was installed by Fidesz in early 2024 after his predecessor, Katalin Novák, resigned in disgrace following a child abuse pardon scandal. To Magyar and his supporters, Sulyok is not an independent head of state. He is a partisan block placed in the presidential palace to veto future legislation and protect the remnants of the old regime.
The Anatomy of a Legal Eviction
The newly passed seventeenth amendment to the Hungarian constitution does not subtly nudge the president toward the door. It slams it shut.
Under the provisions of the amendment, Sulyok’s presidential mandate terminates the very day after the law enters into force. The president has been given a five-day window to sign the bill. If he refuses to do so, Magyar has made it clear that the Tisza party will immediately launch formal impeachment proceedings.
This is not a standard political dispute. It is an existential clash of legal philosophies. Sulyok has vehemently rejected the parliamentary vote, calling the amendment a clear violation of constitutional principles and warning that it creates a dangerous precedent of removing independent officials at the whim of the ruling majority.
Yet, the amendment goes much deeper than the presidency. It represents a systematic restructuring of Hungarian governance.
- Judicial Purges: The amendment introduces a mandatory retirement age of seventy for Constitutional Court judges. This change instantly ends the terms of several senior judges appointed under the Orbán administration who were expected to serve as a judicial firewall against Magyar’s reforms.
- Term Limits for Prime Ministers: To prevent the rise of another decades-long leader, the amendment limits future prime ministers to a maximum of two four-year terms. This legally bars Orbán from ever returning to the premier's office.
- Legislative Term Limits: Members of parliament are now limited to twelve years of service. This rule immediately caused chaos within the Fidesz ranks, prompting high-profile figures like former caucus leader Gergely Gulyás to resign his leadership post in anticipation of his looming forced retirement from parliament.
- Corruption Investigation: The bill establishes the National Asset Recovery and Protection Office, an independent agency granted massive authority to investigate and claw back public funds diverted during the Orbán era.
[Image of Hungarian parliament building]
The Paradox of Restoring the Rule of Law
The suddenness of these changes has sparked an intense debate among legal scholars, human rights organizations, and international observers. Can a government restore the rule of law by resorting to the same heavy-handed, constitutional rewriting tactics used by the autocrat they replaced?
For years, the European Union struggled to handle Orbán’s systemic capture of the Hungarian state. Traditional legal challenges failed because Fidesz had fastidiously ensured that every illiberal measure was technically legal under their newly drafted constitution. Magyar’s defenders argue that playing by the old rules is a fool's errand. They point to neighboring Poland, where Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s reformist government has found its agenda repeatedly vetoed and blocked by an Orbán-aligned president, leading to political paralysis.
Magyar’s administration is determined to avoid the Polish trap. They believe their overwhelming electoral victory in April gave them an explicit mandate to bypass traditional decorum in order to rescue the state.
But organizations like Amnesty International Hungary have expressed deep concern. They warn that bypassing formal impeachment trials and removing a sitting head of state via a lightning-fast constitutional amendment undermines the very stability of democratic institutions. If a two-thirds majority can simply vote a president out of office on a Monday afternoon, then no institution in Hungary can truly be considered independent of the executive branch.
The Opposition Reacts to the New Reality
While the Tisza party celebrated the amendment with a standing ovation in the parliament chamber, the remaining lawmakers of Fidesz staged a complete boycott of the session. Instead of debating, they gathered at the grave of József Antall, the nation's first democratically elected post-communist prime minister, to frame Magyar’s actions as the death of Hungarian democracy.
From abroad, Viktor Orbán made his thoughts clear. Traveling in the United States to attend World Cup soccer matches, the former prime minister posted a black-and-white photograph of Magyar on social media with the caption "Democratic Hungary: 1990–2026." The post was meant to signal that the post-communist democratic era in Hungary had officially ended under Magyar's rule.
Political analysts in Budapest were quick to point out the irony of Orbán lamenting the loss of democracy while traveling to watch football matches on another continent. His absence during one of the most critical votes in modern Hungarian history suggests a party that is temporarily leaderless, disoriented, and struggling to find its footing against a leader who matches their own aggressive political style.
The fight is far from over. President Sulyok still has the option to refer the amendment to the Constitutional Court before signing it. However, with the court itself facing an immediate purge of its oldest members under the new retirement rules, any judicial resistance may prove to be a temporary roadblock rather than a permanent stop. Magyar’s government has made it clear that they are prepared for a prolonged, bare-knuckles political fight to ensure a new, Tisza-approved president is in office before the national holiday on August 20.
In attempting to cure the illiberal rot of the last sixteen years, Hungary’s new leadership has chosen a path of radical constitutional therapy. Whether this aggressive operation succeeds in reviving Hungarian democracy, or simply replaces one dominant political machine with another, will depend entirely on how Magyar uses the absolute power he has just seized.
